Why Emerson Direct and Social Media Marketing ?

For years now, Emerson Direct has been extolling the virtues of Direct response marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for websites. It has become an extension of Emerson Direct's business offereings. To that end, Emerson Direct has devoted considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEM for raising our client site's performance on paid listings as well as organic search listings.

While we constantly preach and believe in the power of SEM and SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we will split into 2 for the sake of this intro. That is Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing(SMM). The concept behind SMO/SMM is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

Conversely, SMM plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits a social media type bookmarking sites homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites. A prime example would be that SMM are the things that are done off-site. Specifically, participating in online communities where your customers could possobly go or do business, would be an active role that falls under SMM.

Below are 5 directives that we use to help guide us when working with a client's website:

Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. Unlike the Emerson Direct's site, in which content is constantly added. But, to optimize a site for social media, we increase the linkability of the content. The first step might be to add a blog. However there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.

The importance of making tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we like to go beyond this, by making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).

Reward inbound links - We often use and stress the importance of inbound links as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website). Inbound links are critical to a site rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we stress the importance of making it easy and providing clear rewards. From using Permalinks and Trackbacks to recreating similarly, listing recent linking blogs on client sites provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.

Making your content more Web 2.0 compliant- Unlike much of SEO, SMO and SMM is not just about making changes to a site. We stress the need to have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help the content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to the client site.

Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, Emerson direct believes that it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so that one can embed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment a clients content.

To find out more about Emerson Direct and what Emerson Direct can do for your marketing needs, contact Emerson Direct at 239-254-0175 For a more comprehensive overview, click through to our direct response marketing overview page! Also, for the latest in Emerson Direct news and observations, check out the Emerson Direct Response Observations